no surprises here: we’re short on transportation funding in PA – come complain

The Post-Gazette has an article today about the release of Rendell’s Pennsylvania Transportation Funding and Reform Commission‘s report.  The short story:  we’re short about $866 million for basic maintenance of our current infrastructure, and needed improvements to that infrastructure will cost us an additional $2.2 billion we don’t have.  Everyone should make a point of planning to attend the “listening session” scheduled for September 12 at 10:30 am in the Regional Enterprise Tower (send me an email if you want a personal reminder about this).  Listening sessions like this one are, imho, usually pretty frustrating — it’s a lot of the same people every time, bitching into the ether about the fact that our local leaders can’t seem to prioritize meaningful improvements to public transportation, and you do get the sense that no one’s listening.  Personally, I think part of the problem is that it’s usually just the same handful of transportation nerds that show up to these things — it’s easy to come away with the feeling that the general public doesn’t care, or at least doesn’t care enough to stay informed or show up.  Which is, of course, bullshit:  this is a serious crisis, and it’s going to punch every pedestrian, driver and bus-rider in the region in the gut in the next few months, if the legislature doesn’t get serious about assigning new funding for public transportation and allocating adequate resources to infrastructure maintenance.  So:  we should all show up, for chrissake, and make the event newsworthy for a change.

Keep an eye on political hanky-panky that’ll make lobbying for new highway projects like the godforesaken MFX part of the discussion about funding maintenance and repairs this fall.  Everyone should be clear about the fact that saddling ourselves with an additional $4 billion in new and unnecessary highway construction costs is a non-starter, when what we really need to do is fix what we’ve already got.  K?